Shakespeare’s Songs: A Concert-Lecture, featuring the music of the Bard’s plays, with singer-storyteller Jack DesBois and pianist Joe Mulholland
Friday, August 11 @ 3:30 pm
Tickets Adults $30.00 Students $20.00
Saturday, August 19 @ 3:30 pm
Tickets Adults $30.00 Students $20.00
Come enjoy this behind-the-scenes exploration of the musical world of Shakespeare’s plays.
William Shakespeare was not only the English language’s greatest poet, but also one of its most enduring songwriters. The songs he wrote for his plays baffle scholars and delight musicians—because, for the most part, nobody knows exactly how the original music sounded. Composers over the centuries have written new music for the Bard’s words, while scholars have sought out Elizabethan-era tunes that fit the words well and therefore just might have been the original settings.
Singer, actor, and Shakespeare scholar Jack DesBois draws from both approaches in this program. He pairs art song settings of Shakespeare’s most enduring songs—by Schubert, Quilter, Finzi, Stanford, and Coleridge-Taylor—with the same songs sung to their conjectured original Elizabethan tunes. Drawing from his time studying at the American Shakespeare Center and Mary Baldwin University’s Shakespeare and Performance master’s program, Jack explores the plays containing the songs, the characters who sing
them, and the circumstances surrounding the songs’ original performances. The result is an evening of immersion in the captivating music of Shakespeare through the centuries.
Shakespeare’s Songs is an educational enrichment program of DesBois Tutoring & Enrichment. Learn more at: www.desboistutoring.org/shakespeares-songs.html
Takes place under the Windhover tent.
Good Morning Gloucester 